Remote vehicles are increasingly being used in military operations for tasks such as ordinance or explosives handling or disposal, field reconnaissance, terrain mapping, and various other procedures. These remote vehicles are commonly equipped with video cameras and have been used to scout hostile positions in environments such as caves or other non-urban terrain. Such remote vehicles cab be restricted in their operative range to line-of-sight or areas substantially proximal to the teleoperator, due to real-time wireless communications issues (for example, limited wireless bandwidth availability and/or transmission power for transmitting live camera signals to a teleoperator station) presented by remote vehicles that cannot operate autonomously but instead rely entirely on continuous real-time remote control.
In addition, military operations in urban environments may be increasingly common because of political and sociological reasons, and require increase levels of situational awareness. Aerial and satellite reconnaissance can provide valuable information to enhance situational awareness in urban environments, but can only provide limited real-time information to ground troops about what lies around the next corner or on the next block. Military personnel currently perform such reconnaissance tasks themselves, potentially placing themselves at great risk in hostile urban environments.
Although remote vehicles are increasingly being deployed for reconnaissance, non-autonomous remote vehicles are limited by both radio range, interference and the need for a full-time operator. In urban environments particularly, radio signal attenuation caused by buildings or radio interference may substantially reduce the operational range of such non-autonomous remote vehicles. In addition, the need for an operator to devote continuous attention to operating the remote throughout the duration of an operation increases the manpower requirements associated with such reconnaissance.
The speed and/or accuracy of reconnaissance and other missions performed by remote vehicles could be increased if remote vehicles are controlled to cooperate in accomplishing a mission.
In addition, the ability of an operator to control more than one remote vehicle at a time in performing a mission would decrease manpower requirements for missions utilizing remote vehicles.
The effective control and coordination of more than one remote vehicle is both challenging and necessary if such systems are to be successfully deployed. To date, remote vehicles have not been able to operate completely autonomously in scenarios where objectives may be vague, conflicting, or continuously changing.
Providing remote vehicles with the ability to perform certain tasks autonomously, particularly when combined with a user interface for the remote vehicle control system that allows a single human operator to control more than one remote vehicle in an efficient and coordinated manner, would increase the usefulness of remote vehicles in a variety of applications.
To appropriately control more than one remote vehicle, the operator should have adequate situational awareness regarding the spatial proximity, health status, etc. of each remote vehicle, along with perhaps its ability to accomplish and progress toward successfully accomplishing operator-controlled high-level goals. Although the remote vehicles need some level of autonomy, the operator should retain an interface to command the individual remote vehicles at a low-level in the event the remote vehicles fail to execute desired actions autonomously.